ABC, WBTV Team For ‘Girls Without Boys’ From Emily Goldwyn & Sasha Spielberg

EXCLUSIVE: ABC has put in development the half-hour single-camera sitcomGirls Without Boys from Warner Bros Television. Emily Goldwyn & Sasha Spielberg will write the project, and Caroline Williams will be the showrunner and executive produce along with Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Jeff Grosvenor of Jones and McCormack’s Le Train Train will produce. The premise: Three brilliant but socially challenged girls navigate the world outside of single sex education with the help of their eccentric teachers and parents.

The show was hatched by Goldwyn and Spielberg, who are the daughters of John Goldwyn and Steven Spielberg, respectively. They based the concept loosely on their own shared experiences of attending the prestige Marlborough school, located in Los Angeles near a co-ed school. Marlborough may have given them a first-class education, but not about things like being able to talk to boys.

Goldwyn was an assistant to Up All Night co-exec producer Williams, who became her mentor and helped guide this process. Williams just finished Arrested Development on Netflix and this is one of several projects she has percolating. They enlisted Jones — who, speaking of showbiz pedigrees, is the daughter of Quincy Jones and The Mod Squad actress Peggy Lipton. Jones is based at Warner Bros and stars in NBC’s Parks And Recreation and the upcoming indie film Cuban Fury with McCormack, Jones wrote the Sundance romantic comedy Celeste And Jesse Forever, which they both starred in, and they are now writing Frenemy Of The State for Universal and Imagine.

This is the first big deal for Goldwyn & Spielberg as a writing team. They are repped by UTA, Management 360 and Karl Austen, Jones is with UTA and James Adams, McCormack’s reps are UTA and Erik Hyman, and Williams is repped by UTA and Robert Offer.